The Golden Thirteen tells the story of the men who in 1944 became the US Navy’s first black officers, and how civil rights leaders, newspapers publishers and ordinary citizens pushed a nation forward during one of its most strenuous times.
These men were not military men. They were metalsmiths, teachers, lawyers, college kids. They were the children and grandchildren of slaves. They came from all over the country, had seen family members lynched, been denied jobs on account of their skin, subject to the worst forms of verbal abuse.
They had enlisted to fight for a branch that tried as hard as it could to keep them out, certain that mixing races aboard ship would court disaster, bringing aid and comfort to the Germans and Japanese.
They were segregated in their training, mocked along the way, and told to prove the Navy wrong, prove that black men could equal white men. When the final grades were posted, these officer candidates earned the highest marks of any class in history.